


A Time To Be Alive

by MenaceAnon



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Fluff, M/M, Reincarnation, Remembering Past Lives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 02:27:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10630254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MenaceAnon/pseuds/MenaceAnon
Summary: It’s 2017 and Senator Tom Harrison, darling of the Democratic Party, is definitely not hounded by inexplicable flashes of another life. Nor is he falling for his biggest political rival, Alex Colton.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LoopyLouisaCopeland](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoopyLouisaCopeland/gifts).



> "I'm not going to write more than 3,000 words" I said and then wrote over 20,000 words and I'm s o t i r e d.
> 
>  **This fic is long, and has a long list of WARNINGS at the bottom of the first chapter.** Please check them out if you are concerned. I believe I caught everything, but if there’s anything you want me to warn for that I missed please let me know about it if you can.
> 
> [Visit me on tumblr, I'm MenaceAnon!](http://www.menaceanon.tumblr.com)
> 
> Shout out to [reincarnationchance](http://www.reincarnationchance.tumblr.com) for giving me feedback and helping me unknot some plot troubles!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The William Tell Overture (mashup) in question.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a85SGBYiofs) This is played on cellos, but who's counting.

Sometimes, Tom forgets.

The first time it happens he’s fourteen. His mother’s hand is knotted through his own as the pallbearers’ even steps crunch in the frost. Tom hiccups, and suddenly the bare, black trees bleed like wet ink into the blinding gray sky. He doesn’t know the woman holding his hand. He doesn’t know where he is, and he stares at his father’s casket and thinks, _Martha_ , but that isn’t right.

It doesn’t happen again until he’s eighteen, on the floor of a dorm room, watching the cracks in the ceiling swirl gently. Then at twenty-five, the walls of an elevator pressing in around him, surreal. And so it goes, every few years.

There’s no way to predict the episodes. One minute he’s thinking nasty thoughts about the orange line, trapped on a smelly metro car at a dead stop somewhere between L’Enfant Plaza and Federal Center Southwest. He’s scrolling and re-scrolling boredly through the single email his data bought him before all access to the outside world was cut off: a chastisement from Senator Bob Stevens about S. J. Res. 31, or as they're calling it, the “Student Protections Bill.”

The next moment, colors flare and smear and he’s in a long, narrow room full of strangers. No one makes eye contact or speaks. There are chairs, in tight-packed rows on either side of an aisle, like a theater without a stage. As though the architect of this place designed it for no function except to hold as many people as possible. There are no candles, and the windows (his heart gives a horrified leap) the windows look directly out onto darkness and close, gray stone walls, but the whole room is as bright as daylight.

Thomas himself is standing in the aisle with his elbow looped around one of several smooth metal poles, and in his hand is— is—

Is—

 _Words written in light_ , he thinks, and directly on the heels of that nonsense he recognizes his phone.

His phone.

Reality crinkles back into alignment.

He thumbs the phone off and shoves it in his pocket. Grabs his hair and gives the coils a rough tug, then drags in a harsh breath. The woman sitting a few feet down darts him a look, then does a surreptitious double-take. He sees her wondering if Senator Tom Harrison is having a meltdown on a stopped subway car and whether she needs to help him/tweet about it.

He catches her eye and holds it, brow lifted, until she colors and looks away.

“Moving,” the conductor rasps over the PA. Tom shifts his weight onto his heel, and the train grinds forward.

 

* * *

 

Listen, Alex Colton is an ass. And they both — they _both_ — know better. These are rookie mistakes.

“Five hundred dollars says Hevis folds on the vote before the week is up,” Alex says. His hand is down Tom’s pants and god above but this is _not the time_.

“Can you for once just not— haaa. Mm.”

“What, Thomas, were you hoping for sweet nothings?”

“Is that the only other option?” Tom throws his head back. “I don’t really wanna think— think about _Senator fucking Maggie Hevis_ right now. Is this some weird Republican fantasy of yours? Ahn, shit.”

Colton cackles.

 

* * *

 

“Did you tell Molly about Kinder?”

Like Tom said, though: rookie mistakes.

Alex Colton has blown into Tom’s office like a lost storm cloud and closed the door behind him, so odds are good that everyone on Tom’s staff is sitting silently at their desks, straining their ears. He saves his Word file and looks up, because ignoring Alex never works.

“Molly who.”

Alex punches the ambient sound machine to life, leans over the desk, and hisses, “Did you leak to a fucking WaPo reporter that I was firing John Kinder?”

“My word.” He puts a hand over his heart. “What a delicate bit of fuckery that would be.”

“Jesus Christ it was you.” Alex topples back into the chair on the other side of the desk, clutching his hair. His brow squishes endearingly. “How the hell did you even know?”

Fun as this is, Tom estimates he has about a minute and a half before Alex recovers his fury and it devolves into a full-scale Colton rant. Since he doesn’t have six hours to spare — and even if he did that’s not how he would choose to spend them — he’s going to have to head this off at the pass.

He mutes his computer and pings Tonja an SOS on g-chat. As his fingers clatter on the keyboard he drawls, “It sounds like you’re having some very serious staff problems. You should look into that, Mister Senator. It’s hard to get anything done when your house isn’t in order.”

“Well my fucking chief of staff just found out he was getting fired because people were _tweeting a Washington Post article at him_ , so _yeah_ you sonuva—”

A knock at the door cuts him off, right on time. Alex glares, not surprised or fooled, and Tom twirls his chair and cheerfully calls, “Come in!”

Tonja pokes her head through the door, long braids swinging. “Your mom is on the phone,” she tells Tom, because unlike John “Sup Brah” Kinder she’s a damn fine chief of staff and she knows what she’s about.

Sure enough, Colton — already geared up to tell her how important he is compared to some “phone call” — snaps his mouth closed and gives Tonja a look of respect.

“You looking for a job, Tonja?” he says instead.

Tom circles the table, shooing him toward the door. “She’s a Democrat, you heathen. And no.”

“He’s right that I’m a Democrat,” Tonja says, and doesn’t acknowledge Tom’s sharp bark of laughter.

“Tonja simply can’t be spared,” he says through the points of his teeth.

Alex snorts, and relents, though not without leveling Tom with one final, wrathful parting look that promises trouble later. When he leaves, Tonja lets the door swing closed again behind him and examines Tom head-to-foot.

“Are you doing something stupid?”

He doesn’t freeze, because that would be unprofessional. “Well now, there’s a hell of a question. Why are you asking it?”

“Because I know you. And I’m not the only person in this city who knows you. So if you’re doing something stupid you need to tell me. Right now.”

_Rookie mistakes._

Tonja is right. She usually is. Which ought to be aggravating — with just about anyone else it would be. But Tonja is steady and no-nonsense and blisteringly smart, and having her at his elbow, telling him what’s-what, just feels familiar and strangely soothing. Like everything is briefly right with the world.

That probably says some things about Tom.

He takes a slow breath, buying himself a moment to consider phrasing. Is this one of those “rip the bandaid off” situations, or should he actually make an effort to be tasteful?

“Yeah, Hamilton and I are screwing each other,” he says, because honestly he wants to see her reaction.

The reaction never comes. She tilts her head, eyebrows scrunching. And then she says, “Who?”

“Who what?” What did he say? Hamilton? Who in god’s name is Hamilton? “I mean. I mean Colton. Colton and I have been fucking. For like, seven months now.”

That makes a splash. As a matter of fact, the spectrum of emotions trotting one after another across Tonja’s face is broader than anticipated.

“You are more surprised by this than I expected you to be,” he says.

“I thought you were up to something shady,” she says, her voice crimping up into a squeak at the end.

“That doesn’t qualify as being up to something shady?”

She leans forward, hissing, “I thought you two hated each other. You just did the equivalent of lobbing a bomb into the middle of his workplace politics.”

This is true, but Tom waves it away. “Listening at the door, were you? Anyway, this is just payback for that stunt with the town hall last month.”

Tonja — whose job it had been to assure the police that _Senator Harrison does not want to press charges against a dozen fifteen-year-olds with megaphones, laser pointers, and a foghorn, please let them go home to their families officer_ — went very still. “What the hell is wrong with you two?”

“‘You two?’ Why are you lumping me in with him?”

“How much of the bullshit, 19-hour-day cat-herding I’ve had to do in the last seven months was the result of some stupid courting ritual between you and Colton?”

“You make this sound more involved than it is but. Uh, well—”

“No. No, do not actually tell me, because then I will need to be dragged out of here by the secret service.”

Tom rubs his lips. “But you’re not... shocked about the I’m-not-straight thing, though? You’re not mad about that?”

“Tom. Why do you and I work so well together?”

“Opposites attract?”

“We work well together because you don’t try to sleep with me. Why don’t you try to sleep with me, Tom.”

Feeling hunted, he says, “Because... you’re my chief of staff?”

At her (frankly overblown if you ask Tom) scoff, he tries again. “Because you’re a strong independent lesbian who told me where to go and how to get there?”

“Almost there, though neither of those things actually stopped you from trying.”

He cringes at the ice in her voice. “I’m... really not sure this is an appropriate—”

“It’s because you mentioned to your _mom_ that I’m a lesbian, and _she_ told you never to darken her doorstep again if you fired me for not sleeping with you.”

Tom chokes. “How did you—”

“We talk,” she says ominously. “But the real takeaway here is that _I’m a lesbian_. So. First of all, you may have the straights fooled, but no heterosexual man looks at Chadwick Boseman the way you do.”

“Uh.”

“Second of all, why, in god’s name, would you ever think that I — a les-bi-an — would somehow be offended by the fact that you’re not straight?”

“But...” Unfolding a little in the wake of this onslaught, Tom scratches his beard. “You are clearly upset.”

“I sure the hell am. But discounting, for right now, the _hundreds_ of hours of _my life_ that you have wasted because of some bullshit sex game with Alexander Colton, let’s review this one more time, Tom: _Why do you and I work so well together?_ ”

“...Because you’re a lesbian?”

“It’s because you can’t sleep with me. You have a really, really, really bad track record when it comes to screwing things up because you’re sleeping with someone.”

He flinches a little.

“I mean—” she puts a hand over her mouth and Tom narrows his eyes, but she only says, “The whole ‘not straight’ thing is more of a problem for him. He’s the Republican here. But you... Are you guys...” She waves, vague. Then she says, “Are you close?”

“Are we...” It takes him a second, and then the hunted feeling returns. Tom rears back. “No. God, no. No, it’s not—” he holds up both hands, as though he can physically push the very idea away, “this is not an emotional thing.”

She gargles out a disgusted sound and rubs her temples.

“Fine. You’re not attached. Then, Tom,” she moves in, holding his gaze. He recognizes the look in her eye from every time she’s walked another person through a tough call. “You know you have to end it, right? If it isn’t serious?”

He steps back, out of her reach and skirting his desk. Fiddles with the little handmade clock on the corner, his own design. “I don’t see why,” he says, tracing the bezel with a finger. “It’s not affecting my work.”

“No, it’s not. It’s not affecting your work because _I_ have been steadily putting out fires left and right for, oh let’s see, _about seven months now_. What’s worse, you’re escalating. Now, if you could promise me, with any sort of authority, that this... whatever it is... won’t eventually get very, very messy, then I would say sure! Have your fling. But that’s never how this goes, Tom. Ever. You get bored, and it ends up being my job to threaten-slash-pay off some poor woman in Bali who may or may not be carrying your lovechild. I’m sick to _death_ of it, and it’s putting you at risk politically.”

“Well. I mean I really doubt Colton is gonna get pregnant.”

Tonja doesn’t say a word. Her jaw locks and her shoulders go back, blue-black features carved into stern lines.

“Just sayin’,” he mutters.

“You should take your mom off of call waiting,” she says, in a voice like a breath of frost.

Tom’s head snaps up.

“You actually called her?”

“She called. It just happened to coincide with you needing an excuse.”

“Why the—” he hurls himself around his table, bobbling the landline off its cradle, “Why didn’t you tell me, how long has she been on call waiting—”

“I did tell you. You and Colton just assumed I was lying. And long enough to have something to say about it,” Tonja says. Then she pivots on her heel, and stalks out.

 

* * *

 

“How did you even know about Kinder?”

Tom is panting, covered in sweat and other things. Alex glistens appealingly in the street light through the window. His furious expression is much softer than it was at the beginning of the night, though Tom’s ass is not going to thank him for that in the morning.

He groans, and says, “You talk in your sleep.”

Alex stares at him.

“Multiple languages. It’s very unsettling. I didn’t even know you spoke French.”

“You’re telling me you leaked this to a reporter based on something I muttered in my sleep.”

“It's either that, or before you came inside last week you stood on the sidewalk in front of my house to call Samantha Armenteros to tell her you _really_ liked her in the interview and you wanted to offer her the job. And I had the window open so I heard everything. Can I ask a question? Did you interview John Kinder before you hired him? How did he even happen? Not that literally everyone on the Hill has been anticipating this moment, but literally everyone on the Hill has been anticipating this moment.” Alex sits up just enough to snag his pillow and pummel Tom in the face with it. Tom snorts, batting him away. He says, “I'm sure Ms. Armenteros will be an excellent addition to your staff.”

“You realize you just made her life a living hell with this article, right? You cannot imagine the hostility she is facing as a result.”

“Welcome to Washington? What do you want, an apology?”

Alex’s eyes roll in their sockets, and then he stretches, legs quivering toward the end of the bed as he sets his palms against the headboard and arches his back.

The sheet, tangled somewhere around his calf, obscures nothing, and Tom wobbles his foot and lets himself look. Alex is lean, and gold, and a little bit soft for having a desk job. As his back bends, lengthening the lines of his chest, the light catches on the broad white patch of a nasty scar right between his ribs. It’s impressive. The first time Tom saw it he was sure it had to be from a gun.

His fingers always seek the scar out, unthinking, fascinated by the texture. Eventually Alex caught him at it. He’d drawn his thumb along the tendons on the back of Tom’s searching hand and explained that it was from a bad car accident.

Tom remembered the accident, of course. It had been all over the news, helicopter footage of the wreckage transposed beside talking heads and regular updates from the hospital. Alex had been out of work for a month and a half, and had returned as even more of a mess than usual. Looking at the scar, Tom suspects Alex should have been out a lot longer. Alex Colton has never placed much value in rest, though.

 _Weird injury for a car accident. You should have lied and said you were in a gunfight,_ Tom had told him. _I’d have believed you._

_What, like pistols at dawn?_

_Or high-noon at the O.K. Corral._

Alex relaxes from his stretch with a sigh, then turns his head and sees Tom watching and woolgathering. The angle of his brow softens, and after a moment his lips twitch into smile. He glances down at Tom’s chest, huffs a quiet laugh, and rolls away, onto his side.

Tom bites his lip.

This is probably the best time, he thinks.

Tonja was clear. Tonja was also right. Hell, Tom has had the thought himself, over and over again: rookie mistakes. This is getting... distracting. And they certainly can’t keep escalating the war between them the way they have been, not without eventually doing damage. That’s how these things work. And Alex is too dangerous an opponent.

But his shoulders form an enticing slope down to his hips when he lays on his side, and Tom just wants to stare.

He takes a breath, and then lets it go. His thumb fits perfectly against the shadow of Alex’s scapula, fingers tracing circles beside his neck, then trailing down his arm. Tom watches in fascination as the hairs there prickle up and Alex’s breath stutters.

Everything Tonja wants him to say dissolves on his tongue.

“What are you doing?” Alex asks.

Tom gives it up and leans in, follows the path of his hand with his mouth, lips, then tongue, then teeth, until Alex is quivering under him. Shifting up behind him until their bodies are pressed together, he winds his arms around Alex and tugs him close. One hand drifts to his chest. The other goes down.

“We are too old, this should not be working as well as it is,” Alex groans, and then grinds back against him. “Shit.”

“Mm,” Tom agrees, hips rolling, leisurely, against the swell of his ass.

“ _Thomas_.”

“You know, you’re the only one who calls me Thomas,” he murmurs, pressing his lips gently to the skin of Alex’s neck below the line of his hair, and humming low and content. The space around them is warm, and the only sound is their breathing, and the shift of skin over skin.

His nose is buried in the tangled strands behind Colton’s ear, where he smells familiar: cheap shampoo and sex-sweat, a hint of nicotine that means Tom’s stunt with the Washington Post article was sufficiently stressful, and the singular Alex-smell that Tom has never quite been able to map out with words.

Tom’s chest feels full and light all at once, like a too-deep breath that’s aching in his lungs. He curls tighter around Alex, skin alive with the desire to be closer-closer-closer.

Alex’s hands rest over his, and he trembles gently, making soft, needy sounds. Tom rolls his hips in the warm lassitude and his voice is thick and low as he murmurs in his ear.

“C’mon, baby, almost there.” Then he winds their legs together and pulls Alex apart as slow and sweet as caramel.

In the gentle silence that follows, Alex twists in the circle of Tom’s arms, chest moving with each deep breath, eyes slitted. He bends his head until their foreheads touch. And Tom, without thinking, lifts his chin.

They haven’t kissed before. This isn’t the sort of kiss he imagined, either. It’s the slow, sleepy fall of a snowflake, with the tip of Tom’s nose pressed to Alex’s cheek. Alex turns his face, a sweet drag and a flicker of hot tongue, until he can press a kiss to the corner of Tom’s mouth. Tom’s lips part on a round breath.

And then they rest, temple to temple. The world is very quiet.

 

* * *

 

“Eddie! How’s it hanging? TGIF, right?”

“Good morning, Senator.”

Eddie looks especially dapper in his rumpled security blues, and he waves Tom through the metal detector with his mouth set in a dour line. Tom sashays through, then retrieves his cell phone and wallet from the bowl.

He says, “I got a good one for you this morning, Eddie.”

“I’m sure you do, Senator.”

“What time does Sean Connery get to Wimbledon?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Tom splays his hands, grinning between them. “Tennish!”

Eddie, waving a woman through the sensor, nods.

“Eddie, this is comedy gold.”

“It’s very funny, Senator.”

“I can tell,” he rolls his eyes, twirling away. “Keep up the great work, Eddie. You’re an example to us all.”

Past the security checkpoint, the Russell Building opens up into a sunny rotunda, ringed by columns going up three floors, with a statue of Senator Russell himself at the back. Tom nods and waves his hellos, and takes the hall to the right. He doesn't stop to speak to anyone until he spots Tonja, just parting ways with one of the other chiefs of staff. When she sees Tom coming toward her, she purses her lips.

"Good morning sunshine!"

"Morning, Tom."

"What does our day look like today?"

"Meetings. And Bob Stevens was just here asking me if I'd seen you."

He winces. "Let me guess: he wants to corner me in a public place and question my morals."

"I mean he didn't lay it out that plainly, but."

"So he’ll be waiting in the hall somewhere between here and the office. Let's walk the long way around, shall we?"

They backtrack to the entry, and take the left hall instead of the right.

“Good thing Eddie is here to save us from the terrorists,” Tom says, glancing back at the security funnel. “I might feel better about it if he wasn’t a few Wheaties short of a well-rounded breakfast.”

“I’m so glad it never even occurred to you that he just finds you really, really irritating, and wants you to leave him alone.”

“That sounds wrong.” The hall turns a corner and Tom spots a familiar head of dark hair up ahead, leaning into an open doorway. Tom catches his own reflection in the door-window of Maggie Hevis’s offices and tugs the coils of his hair into loose, roguish pieces. When he turns back, Tonja is giving him a narrow look.

He frowns at her. “What.”

“Nothing. You haven't talked to him yet, have you."

They draw nearer to Alex, who is turning out of the doorway, and Tom tugs his sleeves straight and mutters, "Haven't really had an opportunity— Senator Colton! How the hell are you?"

Alex is clutching Starbucks in one hand, and has the wild-eyed look that means he barely slept, the sleeves of his undoubtedly-expensive-but-glaringly-green shirt already rolled up despite the earliness of the day. His hair is only hastily combed, and overall he looks rumpled and half-feral.

It should not make Tom want to touch him all over.

"Busy," Alex says, with an edge to his voice that curls Tom's fingers. "Always busy. I'm bringing on my new chief of staff today."

"Give them my condolences."

"As a matter of fact," Alex continues blithely, "Samantha is someone I'm really looking forward to working with." He smirks at Tonja. "Don't mention this to John Kinder, of course, but actually liking your coworkers can make a hell of a difference."

Tom prickles, stepping in. "Come back to me in a week, yeah? Provided that she's still there by then."

Alex's grin widens, like he has scored a point. "I'll be sure to stop by. Oh and, by the way,” he says, “Senator Maggie Hevis folded on the vote. So I believe you owe me five-hundred dollars.” He leans in close, reaches out and catches the lapel of Tom's blazer, brushing away an imaginary speck of dirt with his thumb. Heat swoops into Tom's stomach, and he stares down at Alex dumbly.

As he watches, Alex turns his head over his shoulder, draws a breath, and shouts, "Hey Bob! Tom's over here!"

Tom yanks away from him. "You sonuvabitch," he breathes.

Alex only grins wider.

Bob Stevens comes chugging around the corner, calling Tom's name. His suit doesn't fit, and his perpetual scowl tugs the lines of his face down into his jowls.

To Alex, Tom says, "Dirty pool, Colton."

"Is there any other kind?"

Bob says, "If you two are done being children, Tom, we need to talk. You've been avoiding me!"

"Maybe. But when we do talk, it doesn't always need to be loudly and in the middle of the hallway, Bob. That's what offices are for."

"If this is the only place I can catch you, then this is where we'll speak!"

"Bye Tonja," Alex says. "Have a lovely day."

Tonja, to Tom's delight, only raises a skeptical eyebrow at him. 

"Good riddance," Bob mutters. Then he rounds on Tom. “Tom,” he says loudly, “this isn’t a game! Our children’s futures are at stake!” His jowly frown is almost comically severe, and Tom marvels once again at the fact that Bob has spent twenty-five years being this useless as a politician but somehow keeps getting reelected.

“Bob, I need you to cool it. The cameras aren’t here, okay? It’s just us Senators, and you are laying it on thick.”

"Excuse me!"

"You are excused." Tom claps him on the shoulder, backing away. "If you actually want to have this conversation you can come to my office and we can do it without an audience that... by the way isn't cheering you on as much as you think it is. Catch you later! Stop sending me nasty emails!" Tom salutes him, then spins on his heel and marches around the corner. Tonja falls in at his elbow.

"Fucking Alex. And fucking Bob, too, what must it be like," Tom wonders, "to be that sanctimonious? Goddamn, but maybe people will work with you if you don't call every hard decision they make a moral failure and then hold yourself up as a shining beacon in comparison."

Tonja snorts, a little too emphatically, but when he shoots her a suspicious look she only says, "I wouldn't mind the sanctimonious bullshit so much if he put his money where his mouth is. But he fills his staff with every average dude-bro white boy with an attitude problem who couldn't get a job anywhere else. I was on campaigns with two of the guys who are on his staff now, and I swear to god they both tried to pull The D.C. Move on me."

Tom twists to look at her. "What? What does that mean? Do I need to destroy their lives? Because I can."

"No? No. Calm down, nothing like that. It’s just that there is this one move that every self-important dude-bro in politics tries on women. It’s like Groundhog Day, but mediocre. They go out for drinks with you and some friends, get all buddy-buddy, and then at the end of the night they catch you alone, lean in, get all intense, and say, ‘I’ve never told anyone this before, but someday... I’m going to run for office.’”

Tom scratches the back of his neck. "Wow."

"And not one but two of the guys who now work for Bob said that to me. And then they stared at me," Tonja continues, "like somehow this bullshit would make me forget I'm a lesbian and jump on their—" Her eyes flash to Tom, and her face abruptly sobers.

Tom clears his throat. 

"I'll run for office myself," she says eventually. "Find a small city to be mayor of and go from there. And there will be no mediocre dude-bros gumming up my staff.”

“Well here’s to the future of our great democracy.”

“Still," she says, and then, more slowly, "Bob is right about this one."

“Ex-cuse me?” Tom steps forward and whirls, walking backwards so he can stare at Tonja. “Sorry?”

“I mean about the Bill. If it doesn’t pass, it’s a huge setback for the people trying to end the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Tom waves. “We've already strategized this Bill. It's something that should be handled by local government. We don’t need to dip our fingers into it at the Federal level.”

They come to the offices and Tom unlocks the door. They’re the first ones there. Tonja walks in, setting her bag down on a desk in the bullpen.

“It’s not _being_ handled at the local level. Not as much as it needs to be. This Bill could really help. And please, your vote isn't some 'tough call' you're making in the face of Bob's sanctimoniousness, or even a bid for states' rights. The only reason you care one way or another is because the private prisons dump wads of money in your pocket every few months.”

“Your pocket, too.” Tom grins with all his teeth.

Tonja doesn't bend. “The prison system is used as a pool of cheap laborers who can't vote and can't unionize. These people have no recourse and no autonomy, and they are disproportionately poor minorities. It's modern slavery, Tom, and it’s on American soil. And the school-to-prison pipeline is just one of the many ways that for-profit prisons keep their numbers up. Schools criminalize kids and hurl them into a justice system that is weighted against them."

"What's happening here? You're like a nitty gritty School House Rock all of a sudden."

"I'm saying— I'm saying, I know it's not what we discussed, but you should vote for this Bill."

"Tonja."

"Listen, I get it. Usually I'm all for keeping the federal government out of our school systems. But this isn't 'No Child Left Behind,' it's a, frankly, astonishingly well-crafted Bill designed to force schools in low-income areas to decriminalize disruptive behavior. And then it helps those schools get the resources and guidance they need to craft alternatives to throwing a child in _prison_. And voting for it is the right thing to do."

Tom stares at her, for a long time. "You were right before, you know," he says quietly. "You _should_ run for office."

She blinks. "Oh."

"Then," he opens the door to his office, and morning light spills out of the door, drawing his shadow in a long dark column across the office, "when you're a Senator, _you_ can vote for the Bill." He walks into the sunny room, and closes the door behind him.

 

* * *

 

There’s a cardinal that keeps her nest in the branches directly outside Tom’s bedroom window, and she wakes bright and early every day. Tom is an early riser himself, though if he has the time he will occasionally linger in bed and listen to her swoopy little song.

Alex groans, and twists the pillow up over his head. The first word he says is indecipherable but almost certainly four letters long, and the second is a ragged, “Biiiirds.” Tom snorts and rolls out of bed, padding for the bathroom.

By the time he emerges from the shower, Alex has found a pair of boxers and propped himself over an enormous steaming mug at the island bar. His eyes are heavy and out of focus, and Tom tugs his robe vaguely closed and leaves him be in favor of prying open the fridge in search of yogurt.

The yogurt, it transpires, is the last of its kind. The refrigerator is otherwise bare by all practical measures: a few fancy beers on the door, some condiments, an outdated carton of milk, and the something-week-old remains of an eggplant parmesan that Tom hasn’t gotten to clearing out of the tupperware. He crouches, prying open the crisper drawer to find a wilted bundle of asparagus. This is what comes of being busy at work.

A hand alights on the back of his head, smoothing over heavy wet coils.

“Good morning,” Alex hums, and dense heat sparks to life in Tom’s belly.

He stands, stepping away to allow the refrigerator door to close. When he turns, Alex gives the cursory loop of his belt a gentle tug. The terrycloth robe falls the rest of the way open, and Alex reaches within.

His palm strokes up the plane of Tom’s abdomen, exploring, before curving around to drag nails in gentle lines down his flanks. Tom’s skin jumps, and he breathes slow and careful — then bites his lips hard when fingers find his nipples and work them into stiff peaks.

“Okay,” he pants. “Okay, but we are not doing this in my kitchen. I prepare food here. _Food_ , Alex. Al-e—.”

He does get them around the island to the living room, before with Alex’s encouragement his knees give out, and he applies himself, enthusiastically, to the task in front of his face.

When his skin has cooled again to the touch, he eats his yogurt naked on a stool at the bar, and licks obscenely at the spoon. Alex remains on the couch, where he landed, and watches him with sleepy eyes.

They dress together, Tom in the full-length mirror and Alex fishing in his closet for something that A) will fit and B) doesn’t look like it came out of Tom Harrison’s closet.

“Magenta,” he says, appearing over Tom’s shoulder wearing a green henley. “It’s, uh, a good color for you.”

“You philistine. This is wine,” he tugs his sweater, “and pewter,” he tugs his t-shirt. “Gold watch, tailored jeans — I am the only fashionable person in this town and I take that responsibility seriously.”

“It’s a nice look. Is this all from JCPenny?”

“Get out of my room, get out of my house.”

The thing of it is, though: Alex does leave. He throws yesterday’s shirt in Tom’s laundry basket, despite Tom’s hiss of annoyance, then fits his wallet and his phone in his pockets and, with one last smack at Tom’s ass, walks out of the room, down the hall to the stairs.

He hesitates at the top. Tom has followed him, like the tail of a comet, and as they come even his mind returns to the other night, to the silent brush of lips in the dark. They never talked about it.

He’s maybe supposed to say something here.

Tonja’s thing, probably.

Alex’s fingers twitch at his side, toying with the seam down the leg of his pants, and then he nods to himself, flashes Tom a taut smile, and trots down the stairs to the front door.

And Tom calls, “Wait.”

He darts back to his room for his wallet, then clatters too fast down the stairs. “I need groceries, and you’re going through the Eastern Market anyway.”

Alex’s mouth twists, but he stays uncharacteristically silent. Tom follows him out.

The day is sunny. They point themselves toward Pennsylvania Avenue and navigate the cobble sidewalks that roll in red-brick waves over the overgrown roots of trees. Tom glances at Alex’s hand, swinging close to his own. He balls his own fingers up and looks away.

The weekend merchants have sprung up in rows of white vinyl awnings. They wrap the perimeter of the brick Eastern Market building, where the grocers work all week long, and their stalls are a riot of color. A woman sells canvasses, loaded thick with paint, and beside her is a stall full of hand-screened shirts, which abuts a stall crammed with candles. Three men work a table weighted down with freshwater pearls, and an old woman calls out to anyone passing, waving a knobby hand at her aromatic jewel-toned soaps.

Thomas greets the merchants but doesn’t linger the way he usually would. For one thing, it’s the first nice Saturday of the year, and the market is already busy despite the early hour. For another, all of them know who he is, and who Alex is, and their eyes are full of questions.

They’re not alone in wondering, either. This is Capitol Hill: most of these people work in government. Tom and Alex shift to the side for a woman with tote bags bulging with vegetables, and as she passes her eyes snag on Alex, then flash, in surprise, to Tom.

Tom gives her his biggest smile, waggles his brows, and swishes away to the next stall.

Alex is already there, scooping up a light-switch plate patterned with tiny middle fingers. He waves it in Tom’s face.

“Do you get royalties every time they sell your likeness?”

“Every time. Ten percent.”

At the end of the row the space opens up, and there is Mrs. Nuñez with her antiques. Her stall is one of the biggest, with everything from an enormous yellow stop light to an old ship’s compass, and Alex slopes off at once to inspect the latter. Tom grins and goes straight to Mrs. Nuñez.

Her head comes up to Tom’s sternum, and if she’s 100 pounds soaking wet he’ll eat the broad white brim of her sunhat. Still, her eyes rake him over head-to-toe, and Tom feels his grin go a little strained.

“You two are here together?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Looks on purpose to me.”

“Got anything interesting for me this week?” Tom chirps, and she lets it go with a look.

She sucks her gums, hums and nods and then trots off. A folding table, covered end to end with milk crates full of LPs, occupies the center of the stall, and she ducks around to the other side and reappears with a violin case. “You said you played.”

Tom leans in eagerly.

“It is very old,” she tells him.

She sets the case down, and Tom pops it open carefully.

Definitely old, but lovely: he lifts it out with both hands, and the morning sun catches in the dark, glossy finish.

“Hello, there.” He turns it over, thoughtful. “She’s got new strings on her.”

“Previous owner played it up until it was sold.”

Which, knowing how much Mrs. Nuñez loves her estate sales, probably means the previous owner is recently deceased. Tom plucks the bow from the case, sweeps it through the rosin, and draws it across the strings. Out of tune, but the shimmering sweetness of the sound startles him into a delighted laugh. He slides up the neck and adjusts the knobs. Checks, adjusts, checks, adjusts, until she’s tuned — G, D, A, E.

Then, with a roll of his wrist, he teases out a series of flourishing scales. Clear and nearly bottomless at the low end, fat and resonant at the midranges and _damn_ but the shimmer carries into the upper registers. He laughs, and tucks in.

“You are very good,” says Mrs. Nuñez.

Which is when Alex lifts his head. “Oh, no. Nope. Please don’t encourage—”

“Do you know,” Tom says, and Alex groans, “I picked up a violin one day and simply knew how to play.”

“Really,” Mrs. Nuñez says, and Tom grins.

“Yes, really, you skeptic.”

“Yeah, you’re a goddamn prodigy,” Alex says.

“As a matter of fact, Senator, I am.” Tom slides up the fingerboard, flutters a high, delicate trill, and then grinds the bow into a rude noise.

Alex opens his mouth, and Tom does it again, louder.

“Are you—” Alex says, and the violin goes _vwompf!_ “I am going to take that thing—”

He swipes for the violin, but Tom dances away, and then immediately dives into the most chicken-pluck down-south fiddlework he can muster, eyes dancing at Alex over the bridge.

Colton has his arms crossed petulantly. “Yeah, well done. You’re like the illegitimate lovechild of Nero of Charlie Daniels.”

Sawing the bow up a minor chord and into thumping syncopation, Tom says, “ _Please_. Charlie Daniels only wishes he could keep up with me.”

A few people have stopped between the stalls to watch, and Tom, who can honestly never resist an audience as long as he doesn’t have to speak to anyone, gives the G peg one last nudge, and then dashes headlong into the Game of Thrones theme song, because he knows this crowd. It is, as he predicted, an immediate hit.

Alex never stops talking, laying out a laundry list of grievances: he insults Tom, and his playing, and the people giving Tom attention when that’s clearly the only reason he’s doing this, there is no good reason on god’s green earth to encourage this man, stop clapping along, what are you doing. No, do not put money in the violin case, you need to tuck that in his belt where it belongs.

He’s the most perfect barker Tom could have asked for.

Tom tells him, “This is all I hear every time you speak on the Senate floor,” and launches into the zippy, insistent rise and fall of the William Tell Overture. Congresswoman Elios is standing up front, and she looks at Alex and nearly falls down laughing.

Mrs. Nuñez says, “This is why the SNL people abuse you two so much.”

“I dunno,” Tom says. Alex’s severe expression is cracking at the edges, revealing the curve of a grin beneath, and the bright, sunshiny thing hopping about in Tom’s chest grows wings and starts full-on flapping. He says, “We are recurring characters on Saturday Night Live, and that feels like a goal I would have set for myself if I’d thought about it.”

Alex snorts. “Is there a list? Climb Mount Everest, learn to cross-stitch, and get Leslie Jones to pretend to be you?”

“They call you two the most interesting people on C-Span,” Mrs. Nuñez points out.

And Tom throws his head back to laugh. He resettles on the violin and with one final, dizzying scrape and flourish and a punctuating slap of his fingers to the lower bout, he tucks the bow under his arm and takes a deep bow.

“How much?” he asks Mrs. Nuñez.

Alex wanders over as he’s signing the receipt, and Tom, feeling buoyant and fey, grins up at him.

“Let’s get lunch,” he says. “Well, brunch. If we look important enough maybe we can actually get a table at Ted’s.”

“I thought you already ate,” Alex says, with a perfectly straight face, and Tom’s heart hops in his breast.

“Yogurt is not enough,” he says, ignoring Mrs. Nuñez’s sharp glance.

Alex doesn’t answer. He draws away from the booth, and from the people still milling nearby, watching them both. Tom bobs after him, not daunted. His head feels light, like he’s ten thousand feet up without an oxygen mask, staring at the drop.

“Come on, what’s the worst that could happen? People could see us? People already see us, and whatever they’re thinking it’s not— that.” He catches Alex’s shoulder with tingling fingers.

Alex darts a look around, and then finally turns to face Tom and then—

Keeps turning. Or the colors of him do, smearing to the right. The brown of his eyes bleeds into the brilliant colors of the painting behind his shoulder, bleeds into the red brick of the Market, and Tom realizes, all at once, that the lightness of his head, the tension in his chest, the tingling of his fingers — these are not euphoria.

“Tom?”

The spell in the metro was barely a week ago, they never happen this close together, he should have _years_ —

Oh, god.

He twists around, looking for a shaded corner, somewhere beyond the milling remnants of an _audience_ , but the ink-bleed blur is worse than it has ever been. He shakes his head and blinks hard, but the world is pulling apart like shredded linen, stretching every shape out of all coherence.

His inner ear rolls over, suddenly, and he staggers to the left. Someone catches him.

His arm is tugged over a shoulder, and he fights the roiling buck of the earth and the strange weight of his jaw to turn his head. This close, he can make out features: hair too short, but those eyes are unmistakable.

“Hamilton.”

Someone familiar. That’s different, too.

The corners of his vision bubble with black — _different, different_ — and he has one trembling, numb-armed moment before agony punches to life in the space behind his eyes. It ricochets back and rings in pealing waves of fire within the walls of his skull.

The sky whorls above him, and his elbows crack on stone when he writhes. He’s not sure how he got on the ground, but Hamilton hangs over him, like the bough of a tree.

Thomas swallows around the taste of bile.

“I don’t want this,” he rasps. Then black, boiling ink consumes the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNINGS (CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS):**
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>  **Rape:** (Chapter 2) There is no actual depiction of rape, but what Jefferson did to Sally Hemmings is alluded to in a dream sequence. It's blink-and-you'll-miss-it brief, which is why "Author chose not to use archive warnings." But it's there.
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>  **Suicide:** (Chapter 2) An extremely brief reference to Thomas making an attempt to OD when he was in college. (Chapter 3) Thomas mentions briefly thinking about not being alive any more.
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>  **Slavery:** (Chapter 2  & 3) This fic addresses the fact that Thomas owned slaves. It’s irresponsible to talk about Jefferson and not talk about the fact that he owned slaves. This is a story about him remembering his past life and he doesn’t get to gloss over the atrocities he’s committed.
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>  **Unwanted sexual advances:** (Chapter 1) The advances themselves are not shown, but they are referenced twice. Thomas, at some point in the past, made sexual advances on a woman who A) is his employee and underling and B) is a lesbian. It is also made clear that he made additional attempts even after she told him to fuck off. Additionally, there is a brief discussion of other straight men making advances on this lesbian character.
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>  **I’m not sure precisely what to call this:** (Chapter 2  & 3) Thomas Jefferson regains the memories of his past life, but he cannot be sure if what he remembers is real, of if he has had some sort of psychological break. It is extremely frightening for him, and he spends a while doubting his own mind. It is revealed that the same thing happens to Alex.
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> On that note – **Ableist language:** (Chapter 2  & 3) Thomas thinks he’s mentally ill, because he suddenly remembers being Thomas Jefferson. He uses some ableist language to refer to himself. Hamilton does the same thing.
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>  **Pretty intense descriptions of something very much like a seizure.** (Chapter 1)
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>  **Descriptions of panic attacks** : (Chapter 2 & 3) These are relatively mild, but they do occur.
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> **Descriptions of depressive behavior.**
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>  **(MAJOR SPOILERS ABOVE THIS POINT)**


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Remember to check Chapter 1 for warnings.** This is where most of them come in.
> 
> Come chat with me on tumblr! I'm [MenaceAnon](http://www.menaceanon.tumblr.com) and I will probably be posting deleted/alternate scenes and tidbits of trivia that didn't make it into the fic. Plus I have a fic tag there with lots of fun stuff that's not on AO3. Come say hello!

The doctor is a petite woman in a long white coat, unsmiling and polite. She calls him Senator Harrison, and takes her time explaining seizures to him. _Tonic-clonic_ is the term she uses. He’s scheduled for a CT scan, she explains, and then offers to recommend him a neurologist.

Thomas doesn’t say much. He nods, and shakes his head, and when she prompts him for questions he only asks if anyone has been to see him. She doesn’t know, but promises to check.

She leaves. He flexes his fingers, the synthetic fabric of his blanket mounding between his knuckles. Color mutes, then smears, then comes to rights. Nothing much changes, though: everything is beige. The walls. The sheets. The interior of his thoughts.

There are no windows, just a vacant black glass rectangle he doesn’t have a name for mounted on the wall, but the room is brilliantly lit by — halogens — that buzz from their recesses in the ceiling.

Thomas Jefferson is alone in his hospital room.

His head throbs. If only he'd thought to ask for paper, and something to write with. He needs to make a list. There is so much to forget. _Halogens. Synthetic fabric. Tonic clonic._

__

There’s a sleek black rectangle sitting on the table beside the bed, glass and metal, about the size of a snuff box. Thomas knows, theoretically, that he can write things on it. He knows he can also use it to talk to someone even if they’re on the other side of the world.

For all of its miracles, however, it cannot call the dead. And Patsy, his daughter, is very certainly dead. James, with her. _Polly. Martha_ , but that’s an old wound.

He could make a second list, and this one could include all of his siblings and every soul he ever passed on the street without remark. It would begin, however, with Thomas Jefferson.

Tom is a Senator from Virginia. He has a credit card and a Mercedes and he remembers, vividly, the scratch of a quill by candlelight; remembers the hot breath of treason on the back of his neck as he chews the end of a feather. He remembers turning over words like stones in his fingers, _When in the Course of human events..._

A nurse’s cart rattles to the door, trailing the flat-voweled garbling of a walkie talkie and the hollow clatter of plastic. He sits up, but the cart doesn’t stop. The squeak of sensible shoes recedes.

His hands shake hard as he reaches for the phone. The only mark on it is a depression at the bottom of the screen, so he sets his thumb there and it flashes to life. With a few taps he navigates to the keypad, then stares at the numbers and cannot remember precisely what they’re for. "Dial" is the word he needs, but there is no physical dial. But he can still — dial someone, that’s right, punch in a sequence of numbers that will direct his call to a specific phone.

Easy. So astonishingly easy.

And Tom knows people. Living people. He can call his mother, who isn’t dead despite the shiver of grief that goes through him at the thought. They had a scare a few years back, sure, but all told she is hale and canny, and still practicing law into her 70s.

In fact she’s in court all week for a case she’s been working on for over a decade, maybe the last big case she'll ever work, although this would be the third "last big case" in recent memory. Tom’s mother is alive, but she's not available.

He can call his office, which, no. Or his sister, but the odds of her picking up are slim. Tonja would answer, because that’s what he pays her for.

Tonja, he suspects, doesn’t want to speak to him.

He could call Alex. Alex had been there, after all, catching Tom as he fell. Staring at him with that look in his eyes, his face bent around the sharp shape of grief. Tom never did get an answer about lunch.

He licks his lips. His mouth is dry enough to be painful, and his lower lip splits open, like a copper penny against the tip of his tongue.

 _Alex_ , he thinks, but that feels wrong. _Alex_. Brown eyes that Tom refuses to wax poetic about, not even in the safety of his own thoughts, no matter how dark or clever. Just the thought of being in someone’s arms eases the tremor in Tom’s hands, and Alex runs hot. If Tom asks him, he'll hold on tight.

Alex, he thinks. And then: _Alexander_.

His hands spasm and the phone drops into his lap. He lets it go, and hooks his fingers over his mouth.

Horror swoops through him, then almost instantly shudders out of shape, bleeds away like a wave from the shore, and comes roaring back as a concussive shock of hope.

He might be crazy, but no one has ever denied how much he looks like Thomas Jefferson. It’s probably the source of this delusion. And by that same tenuous measure, there’s also no denying that Alex looks like Alexander Hamilton, and this, oh, this is almost certainly a mistake, but just _maybe_ Alex also has memories hidden somewhere deep. Waiting to rise up and burn Alex Colton to ashes.

Thomas snatches the phone out of his lap and his finger flashes across the screen, his contacts slashing by until he finds the one he wants and punches it.

“Please,” he breathes as it rings, and doesn’t care which plea is answered.

It rings for a very long time before answering.

“Hello—”

“Alex—!”

“—you’ve reached Senator Alex Colton. Please leave a message.”

There’s a part of Thomas’s brain that is detached enough to marvel at how professional the greeting sounds, despite Alex being Alex and this being his personal-personal number. The rest of him is trying to account for the numbness in his fingers, and the way his breath seems to stop in his throat before it reaches his lungs.

There’s a lengthy beep. It takes Tom too long react, and when he does, his voice is thin and crooked.

“Alex. It’s me.”

The overhead lights buzz. The noise pulses in and out, in time with the throbbing of his head. Tom covers his other ear, but it doesn’t fade.

“Please. Call me.”

There’s more he wants to say, volumes worth of words, but he cannot find the end of the thread of his thoughts and his throat is pinching closed. His heart kicks in his chest like a loose stone.

He hangs up. Drags the thin sheet over his shivering shoulders and clutches it, tendons taut. He stares at the dead television, and the halogens hum.

Tom puts the phone in his lap, and he waits.

 

* * *

 

The Neurologist runs him through a battery of tests — an MRI, extensive blood work, a sleep-deprived EEG — and prescribes him medication. She tells him he won’t be able to drive for a year — longer if he chooses not to medicate. Reminds him to get enough rest or it could happen again. Asks him if he has experienced anything like this before.

Tom says no.

He goes home.

The world continues to occasionally smear, colors melting out of place. His head hurts, and reading and writing make it worse. There’s still no food in the refrigerator, but Tom isn’t particularly hungry, and those times when he is, he definitely doesn’t feel like walking to the store, or cooking, so he orders takeout.

He huddles on his couch, and reminds himself of the names of things.

Blue tooth. Zipper. Bicycle. Camera. Kiwi.

His typing has slowed to a crawl, but his hands can tie a cravat in a blink.

He drinks coffee, and avoids sleep.

On Wednesday, rain sheets down the windows, and thunder noses through the low buildings of Washington, D.C.. When the buzzer for his front door starts to bray, Tom nearly jolts out of his skin. He shoves his laptop away and pushes to his feet, lurching to the door.

He hadn’t thought far enough ahead to expect anyone specific, but he knows he’s surprised to see Tonja, standing under an umbrella.

She blinks hard, and stares back at him for a second too long. Tom, mortified, shuffles back to let her in. He crosses his arms tight, skin hot with a sudden and intense awareness of himself: his oversized snowmageddon T-shirt with holes in it, sweatpants, enormous glasses, mismatched threadbare socks, and an overgrown scruff. He leads her to the living room, and curls his feet under him on the couch as she runs through the standard how-are-yous. He doesn’t make much of an effort to be convincing with his answers.

“Who else has been by?” she asks him, eventually, and he suspects this is the question she's been sitting on. She’s standing at the egress of the living room, back to the staircase, with her arms at her sides.

“What?” Tom peers at her from under his fringe, and regrets letting her in. “No one,” he says.

“Your sister? She hasn’t checked in?” Tonja scans the room. The coffee table is crowded with takeout containers and innumerable bottles of water. An enormous orange pill bottle and sheets of instructions from both the hospital and the neurologist hog the kitchen island.

“We don’t really talk.”

“You just got out of the hospital, though.”

Thomas nods, and eases his feet out from under him. He aches.

He says, “Have you heard anything from Alex?”

Tonja is quiet for so long he thinks maybe she didn’t hear. He looks up, ready to repeat himself, but finds she’s staring directly at him. He tugs on the sleeve of his t-shirt and looks away again.

“No,” she says. “He hasn’t been by. Has he talked to you at all?”

Thomas licks his lips, and shakes his head.

Tonja blinks at him, then inches into the room, and something about the slow way she moves, the set of her shoulders and the steady, keen look in her eye, opens a box in Tom’s thoughts.

He thinks, Oh.

Of course.

 _James_.

Tonja — not always, but sometimes, and keenly — reminds Thomas of James.

James as in Madison, Tom thinks. James Madison. Tom is losing his mind and he desperately wishes he could talk it over with _James Madison_ , fourth president of the United States, author of the Bill of Rights, and master of keeping a level head whenever Thomas was panicking. He would have some reasonable take on all of this, would skip the empty platitudes and offer Thomas something practical, tangible and reassuring.

James Madison is two centuries dead, and there is only Tonja before him. Tonja, who is his employee, not his friend. Tonja, who has come to check on him anyway.

“Why are you here?” he asks her.

“You just got out of the hospital.”

“Yeah,” he says slowly, “you mentioned. And?”

Thunder rattles the windows. Tonja sucks in a breath and moves over to a pizza box. She scoops it up, checks to see if it’s empty, then straightens the ends and folds it in half.

“Your mom called me,” she admits. “Her trial is still going on, and she can’t get away right now.”

Tom looks over at his phone, which sits dead on the couch beside him. There is footage of his collapse making the rounds. Of course there is. He’d made a scene right beforehand, so people already had their cameras ready. Tom Harrison collapsing more or less into Alex Colton’s arms: very dramatic. Thomas’s voicemail is full to the brim with reporters reaching out, asking for statements — and empty of anything else.

“What’s the official line about all this?”

Tonja is carrying an armful of plastic water bottles around the island to the kitchen, opening them and draining them into the herbs potted under the window, then dropping the bottles into the recycling.

“We’re telling reporters that you had a seizure. That the hospital gave you a clean bill of health, released you, and you’re home resting. On the DL we’re pushing the narrative that you exhausted yourself working overtime on the Student Protections Bill.”

“Mm. That’s good.”

“Tom?” Tonja stands with her hands behind her, hooked on the edge of the kitchen sink. She leans back and the gray, rainy sunlight shines in the texture of her braids. Her lips move, just for a moment, around whatever it is she really wants to say.

She settles on, “Did you always have an accent?”

It’s clear she means it to lighten the mood. He’s not sure what his expression does, but he sees Tonja swallow. She turns around, and fusses with the sink.

“Are you going back to the office?” he asks, eventually.

“I was planning to. I can stick around, though. If you want.”

“To do what? Clean up more of my messes?” He tips sideways on the couch, head coming to rest on the arm, and ignores the look she gives him by throwing his arm over his eyes.

“No,” he tells her. “You sure as hell don’t owe me that.”

 

* * *

 

In his dreams, when sleep snares him, he holds a glass of water. It is crisp and clear in the swollen fever of a Virginia August, and it is _endless_. Somehow he knows this to be true: every person in the world could drink their fill, and it would never run dry.

Thomas stares at it. He’s thirsty.

On the steps of his white-washed porch stands Sally Hemmings. Her eyes are dark and wide, and she is reaching out toward the glass, trembling with the weight of the heat. Behind her stand multitudes, men and women, stretching out into the bug-stung fields where the eye of the sun crushes the world into a hazy furrow. A sea of dark bodies. _Endless_.

Thomas wraps one large hand around Sally’s tiny wrist like an iron cuff, and drags her deeper onto the porch, slithers an arm around her, pulls her into the heat of himself.

“If only there was some way I could help you all,” he says.

And then he drinks.

 

* * *

 

 

The cherry blossoms are crisp white stained pink, and they smother the knurled charcoal bark of their trees. The branches bow low across the path to dip toward their black-mirror reflection in the tidal basin.

Around the bend, the Jefferson Memorial looms, gleaming white and immense.

Thomas swallows, and turns his eyes to the ground.

“...so now I’ve won the case a fourth time, and this go-round the judge quoted my argument word-for-word in her opinion. The other side will want to take it to the Supreme Court, of course. They don’t know when to quit, and opposing counsel couldn’t settle his own stomach if he wanted to. Something to look forward to, I suppose.”

There’s a low-hanging branch in the path, held down by the weight of the flowers and nodding in the breeze. Thomas catches his palm against it and dips under.

Then he starts at a touch to his arm, his mother’s elbow looping through his. He tugs his hand out of his pocket and offers her his arm properly, in a gesture that has always been both too old-fashioned and too familiar. His stomach twists.

“You’re too much in your own head to hear a word I’m saying, aren’t you” she says. After a moment, she adds, “You know, I tried to call you. You didn’t pick up.”

“Sorry. Reporters. I turned off my phone.”

She lets this go, but he can feel her eyes on him. “You keep saying you’re alright,” she says, and then stops. They shift closer to the water, allowing a woman with a wide stroller to pass. It’s overcast and a weekday, but it’s warm, and D.C. is slowly coming outside. A few people glance at Thomas as he passes, more or less discretely — more than usual, no doubt thanks to his time in the limelight this week. He wants to snarl. His mother is ignoring the attention, however, and so he follows her lead.

She does wait until they’re alone, however, to continue, voice low. “This is your favorite place.” She waves to the tunnel of bright flowers all around them. “At your favorite time of year. But Thomas, I haven’t seen this look on your face since I found you on the floor of your dorm room." Thomas winces hard, remembering the little empty bottle in the palm of his hand, and his mother rubs his arm where it links through hers. “Baby, are you alright?”

A plane booms low overhead on its way to Reagan Airport, the noise rolling down the treed slope and across the water and buying Thomas a moment to think. He watches it turn on a wing over the basin, landing gear folding out, before vanishing behind the tall columns of the Memorial. He could, if he wanted to, be in France by tomorrow night. Could be just about anywhere in the world in a day.

“It’s just these meds they’ve got me on,” he says. And he wants to leave it at that, but, as though he can’t stop himself, he adds, “And I feel like I can’t trust myself any more. Everything... aches. And when I close my eyes I have these nightmares, and they’re— uh.”

He wishes she would say something, and stop him there. There’s a good chance she knows it, too, and is ruthlessly holding her peace.

He admits, slowly, “I think that I have been living my life one way for a very long time and that it’s not...” He shakes his head. His eyes linger on the glimpse of white marble ahead, and he finds he can't look away.

"Talk to me,” his mother says.

He tips his head back, and forces himself to breathe. “I... hurt people.” The enormity of it, the staggering, horror-beast scale, rocks through him again, like a gale wind rearranging his insides. He wants to scream, he wants it to go away, and he knows he doesn’t have any right to want those things. “I hurt people I have power over, and people who look to me to be better than I am. People who are kind to me. And people who have nothing to do with me at all.”

“Oh. Oh, honey.” Thomas, recognizing that tone, gives her a cautious look. She strokes his hand and says, “Thomas, you thought you were going to die, and then when you woke up alive you realized that you’re a self-centered, heartless hypocrite, didn’t you.”

“ _Shit_ , mama!”

“Language.”

“Sorry. Uh. Sorry. Is that—” he hesitates, thinks, _what you think of me?_ but can’t bring himself to say it.

There’s no use pretending to be surprised by what people think of him.

“What do you do with a second chance you don’t deserve?” he asks instead, because this is the thing he really wants to know. “Something you already have that you could never earn, and that should belong to... anyone but you?”

It’s his mother’s turn to pause.

The walkway opens up ahead, the grand granite and marble stairs of the monument sweeping high. Thomas holds the rail, and his mother holds him, and they slowly make their way together to the top.

He used to love this place. The enormous columns of the portico, the airy white rotunda, grand and majestic, with a shallow dome. In the very center is a tall bronze sculpture which Thomas carefully does not look at.

Four separate inscriptions ring the perimeter under the dome, and his mother moves at once to the fourth, the one Thomas always thought seemed rather disjointed. He knows now, no longer a hunch but for certain, that it is an amalgamation of quotes, not even from one single source. Someone meant to form a narrative out of disparate passages. Thomas is rather afraid they succeeded.

His mother reads it aloud:

GOD WHO GAVE US LIFE GAVE US  
LIBERTY. CAN THE LIBERTIES OF A  
NATION BE SECURE WHEN WE HAVE  
REMOVED A CONVICTION THAT THESE  
LIBERTIES ARE THE GIFT OF GOD?  
INDEED I TREMBLE FOR MY COUNTRY  
WHEN I REFLECT THAT GOD IS JUST,  
THAT HIS JUSTICE CANNOT SLEEP FOR-  
EVER. COMMERCE BETWEEN MASTER  
AND SLAVE IS DESPOTISM. NOTHING  
IS MORE CERTAINLY WRITTEN IN THE  
BOOK OF FATE THAN THAT THESE  
PEOPLE ARE TO BE FREE. ESTABLISH  
THE LAW FOR EDUCATING THE COMMON  
PEOPLE. THIS IT IS THE BUSINESS  
OF THE STATE TO EFFECT AND ON  
A GENERAL PLAN.

“He did talk a big game,” she adds, “for a man who would only ever wield his power for his own benefit.” Then she chews her lip. Grips Thomas’s hand, and leads him out the back of the dome. The clustered families and gawping tourists thin to nothing, and outside the echoing chamber the world seems very quiet. There aren’t stairs here, so much as immense blocks leading down toward the water. Below them, cherry blossoms crowd the dark lip of the basin. The clouds are burning away, leaving the sky hot and blue.

“When the world hands you an opportunity to be better than you were," his mother intones, "you have an obligation to take that opportunity. It doesn’t matter if you deserve it.

“Baby,” she continues, “you are the smartest man I’ve ever met. And I love you with all my heart, don’t you every doubt that. But you have been a senator for 10 years. You are respected by your peers and your opponents alike. Your name comes up when the people on the television speculate about future presidents. There are few people I know of in a position to do as much good as you could if you just put your mind to it. But Thomas? You are lazy. And you are damn selfish. So if you’re awake now, that’s wonderful. It’s good of you to join us. There are few things in this world that could make me happier. Now get off your ass, and get to work. You’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for. Start small, and find your way. But hurry it up.”

Thomas coughs a laugh, then turns and rests his forehead on his mother’s shoulder. She reaches up, stroking fingers through his curls.

The world smears. Only a little, only at the edges of things. It settles again after just a moment.

Maybe he’s having some sort of meltdown, or a tumor is pressing on his brain, perhaps, that the doctors didn't pick up on, and it's preying on his over-inflated sense of self-importance. He's read more then a few books on Jefferson, and his mind is clever enough to make things up to fill in any gaps. If Tom's going to have delusions, is it any surprise they'd be grand ones? So really, maybe he should just shrug this all away; dust off that guilt of impossible, incomprehensible magnitude. Talk to his doctors to figure out how long he has to live before the cancer eats his brain.

But the guilt he feels isn't trapped in some 18th century maybe. The scale is different for his new life, but the shame remains, and now that he’s picked it up, he finds he can’t put it back down.

And...

When Tom was six, he took up a violin, put it to his chin, and played a perfect rendition of a song he'd never heard, with an instrument he had never touched in his life. Many years later he learned that the song wasn't something he'd made up, but rather an obscure piece from an early American composer. A friend of Thomas Jefferson.

Tom remembers the composer, remembers his noisy cat and cluttered apartment.

He swallows.

His mother leads them back inside, and this time they go right up to the enormous bronze statue. Tom forces himself to look.

It’s his face. Much too serene, of course — the serious face he made in all his portraits that James always flattened his lips at, amused.

“That is the damndest thing,” his mother mutters.

Tom licks his lips, then forces his voice to something light, and says, “Maybe I was Thomas Jefferson in another life.”

She flicks him an annoyed look. “Then I’d say you had better get moving on the whole self-betterment thing.”

His heart pinches, but he nods. He examines the statue. “I could start braiding my hair.”

She tips her head, eyeballing the back of his skull. “That’d look good on you.” Then she shoots the statue another assessing look. “Just avoid long coats.”

“I like long coats.”

“Do you see this statue? No man needs a coat like that. Look at it. Is that fur?”

Thomas stares at the coat, stately in bronze, and then surprises himself by laughing. His mother slants a look at him out of the corner of her eye. “You know, that coat was magenta,” he tells her. “The whole outfit. Magenta velvet.”

Her face slowly splits into a delighted grin and then, when he nods, ‘yes, really,’ she throws her head back and cackles.

When she catches her breath, she looks him over again, head to foot, then nods to herself, and leans up to peck him on the cheek. “Let’s walk down to Dr. King’s memorial,” she says. “Maybe you can get some ideas.”

 

* * *

 

Start small.

There are fistfuls of wrongs dropped everywhere along the paths of Thomas’s life, enough to drown in when he turns to look back. But his mother was right, and so Thomas picks just one, and starts doggy-paddling.

Alex can talk until he’s blue about a smooth transition in his office, but Samantha Armenteros, his new chief of staff, has come to her new job under fire drill conditions. According to Tonja, she’s struggling to get the respect of the staff: no matter how much John Kinder, Alex’s previous chief of staff, was universally despised, Samantha took his job before it was even available. And thanks to the information Thomas leaked to the Washington Post, everyone knows it. The staff doesn’t know her, they don’t like her, and they don’t trust her.

A casualty of Tom’s wrecking-ball.

He buys a bouquet.

Bouquet may be an understatement, since what he has is actually the biggest, most obnoxious thing in the flower shop. It has branches sticking out of it.

His heart still sits like a stone in his breast, and even as he’s pulling out his credit card he comes close to changing his mind and leaving the flower shop. Tom would like, very much, to lock himself in his home. But at the same time, after spending a day outside with his mother, the thought of being trapped alone with his thoughts again makes his skin crawl.

And the bouquet makes him laugh.

At the security checkpoint, Eddie looks at the bouquet with an expression Tom has only ever seen before on the donkey from Winnie the Poo. It’s funny, but Tom stares back at him and discovers, to his horror, that he can’t quite muster his usual shit-eating grin. In the end he just sighs and says, “It’s important, Eddie.”

“Good to see you healthy, Senator.” And if it’s the least enthusiastic thing Tom has ever heard from the least enthusiastic man Tom has ever met, Eddie still waves him and his bouquet through, so Tom figures it counts.

He goes left past the rotunda.

He needs to be able to act like his old self if he’s going to sell this apology, so as he walks the thankfully-empty halls he breathes deep, rolls his shoulders, and shakes his hair until his muscles come loose and he can force the light into his eyes. Fake it hard, he thinks.

He gets to the door labeled “Alexander Colton,” turns the knob around the bouquet with some juggling, and lets himself in. This time, the grin comes to him.

Hamilton— _Colton’s_ staff looks up warily as he enters. Tom’s not here terribly often, but when he does come by he tends to make an impression.

“Hello, everyone. How are you today?”

There’s not really a coordinated response, a subtle sign of internal chaos. They mostly just stare at him, and then at the bouquet, and then at each other in a sort of mental rock-paper-scissors. Before anyone wins or loses, a stout woman in an orange pencil skirt and low heels steps out of the open door to the chief of staff’s office.

“Can I help you?” she says brusquely, and Tom, for one of the few times in his life, is utterly speechless. His hands spasm around the bouquet.

“Senator Harrison?” she asks, when he’s quiet for too long. And of course she knows who he is. From the purse of her lips, the low set of her brow, and the tension in her voice, Tom thinks it’s a safe bet that’s not all she knows about him, and oh, good, Alex ratted him out, perfect, wonderful, because—

“I know you,” he says.

“I’m sorry?”

He drops the bouquet on a startled staffer’s desk, drags a hand through his hair and then scrambles to pull his phone from the back pocket of his jeans.

“I know you,” he says again, numbly, and pulls up Facebook.

“Senator Harrison, are you feeling alright?”

“I’m not having a fucking seizure. You—” He growls a little, struggling to find the photo he wants. He says, “Two years ago my mother had an atrial fibrillation and passed out while she was swimming.”

“Oh,” she breathes. “ _Oh_.”

“And this—” he finds the picture, pulls it up and spins the phone around, pushing it toward her. “This is the selfie she took with you when you visited her the next day in the hospital. After you pulled her out of the ocean and saved her life.”

Samantha stares at the photo for a long moment. She is quiet for a very long time. Then she looks up and meets Tom’s eye.

The office is dead silent. Samantha’s round face is working slowly through the progression of her thoughts, and Tom finds himself waiting with cold dread for their conclusion.

“You would be Tommy,” she says, eventually. She looks him in the eye, and Tom holds his breath. One of her eyebrows ticks up, a challenge, and she says, “Is it true that one time you got your braces caught in the carpet for an hour, and then did it again a week later at a friend’s house?”

The leaden silence snaps when someone in the office chokes on a startled laugh.

He stares at her, then covers his mouth and drops his chin. After a moment, he sits down hard on the edge of the desk, next to the flowers. “I deserve that.”

“Yes. You do.”

“Fuck.”

“Mm-hm.”

He considers the bouquet. “Do you want these flowers?”

“No.”

“Right.” He rubs the back of his neck, and peers at her over the tops of his glasses. Then he grabs a sticky note and a pen from the desk, and scratches down a number. “This will reach my personal phone. If you ever need... I’m going to say literally anything at all...”

She takes the sticky with a gracious nod. “I’ll keep you in mind.”

“Uh. Good then. Great. I’ll just...”

“Did you come here to see Senator Colton? To... give him that flower monstrosity?” Samantha asks.

He didn’t, he tells himself. He came to see Samantha. This wasn’t his first choice of good deed because he was hoping to see Alex.

It wasn’t.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, and heaves a sigh. “Yeah,” he admits. “He got me to the hospital. The least I can do is bitch at him about it.”

“Okay. Well he was on a conference call, but it may be over and he just forgot to open his door again. If he’s available, I’ll let him know you’re here.”

He pushes to his feet, careful not to be obvious about the fact that he’s composing himself. He maneuvers the gargantuan mass of flowers back into his arms. “Sorry,” he tells the staffer whose desk he hijacked, around a mouthful of peony.

She stops gaping after Samantha, just long enough to blink up at Tom. “No problem?”

Samantha reappears, faster than he expected, and Alex’s door is open behind her.

"The Senator will see you."

 

* * *

 

Thomas immediately regrets the bouquet. He can barely see Alex around it, and he’s not sure where to put it, and the sudden tremble in his hands is making the flowers rustle noisily. After a long, anxious moment of indecision, he stalks forward and flings it across the arms of the chair in front of Alex’s desk.

This is the first glimpse Tom has had of Alex’s face since his collapse. He wasn’t anticipating the wild way his stomach swoops, and he puts a hand on the back of the chair to steady himself.

_We are running a real nation, Mr. Jefferson. Would you care to join us?_

Tom swallows hard and doesn’t speak. Eventually, Alex gestures at the flowers. “What... is this?”

“I was gonna give them to Samantha, but it turns out she saved my mom from drowning.”

“...Right.”

Tom licks his lips, shakes his head, and forces his thoughts into order. “I wanted to thank you. I mean, it’s not like you could have just left me where I fell when people had their phones out, but. I went down, and you took care of things. So. Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

Tom waits. This is Alex, after all, who has never (never) met a sentence he didn’t want to cram more words into. But the silence hangs.

 _Ask him_ , Tom thinks, but then bats the idea away like a mosquito. _No._

There is disquiet in the width of Alex’s eyes, Tom sees, and in the way his fingers fidget over the edge of his table, nudging the keyboard out of place. Tom, after a week spent concocting theories for Alex's silence, thinks again about the moments right before he dropped in the Market.

Pain snags high in his throat. He waits until it fades, and then says, carefully, “I also wanted to apologize for the way I was acting, right before the uh, the seizure. This isn’t that kind of relationship. I know that.”

Alex stands, and Tom can see the antsy tension in his limbs. He’s never been given to stillness, not in any of Tom’s memories, but this is the jerky agitation that means something is wrong.

It's no leap to guess that "something" is Thomas.

“Your brain was getting ready to pitch a fit,” Alex says coolly. “You weren’t yourself.”

And Tom turns that lie over against the roof of his mouth, forces a smile, and says, “Yeah. You get it.”

His smile fades. He stares at the familiar shape of Alexander Hamilton’s face, and his memory is a tangle of cold December Cabinet Chambers and the steamed backseat windows of Alex Colton’s car.

“Oh,” Alex says. He stops pacing, changes tack and walks to his credenza. From beside it, out of sight, he retrieves a familiar black case. “Before I forget.”

“The violin.”

“Mrs. Nuñez gave it to me. Made me swear on about six generations worth of dead family members that I would get it to you.”

“I was holding the case when I fell.”

“The violin looks fine to me, but I’m no luthier. You’ll have to look it over yourself.”

He could open the case now, but suddenly Thomas wants nothing more than to be out of here.

 _Ask him_ , he thinks. _Ask him: Do you ever forget where you are?_

But the thought of Alex saying _yes_ is as terrifying as the thought of Alex saying _no_.

So he scoops up the violin case, and backs away.

“Thanks,” he says. “For everything.”

And Alex stares at him with wide, sharp eyes.

This, Tom thinks, has the taste of an ending. The separate pieces of this thing between them feel like sand in his hands, and he doesn’t know how to stop the grains from slipping away.

There is a part of Thomas that looks at Hamilton’s face and sees an enemy. It is the same part that looks at him and hopes, desperately, to be remembered.

The rest of him only wants to hold on tight.

“Thomas?” Alex’s quiet voice cuts through his thoughts. And then, like a missed step in the dark, he says, “As you were seizing, you said the name ‘Hamilton.’”

Tom freezes.

Alex is fidgeting again, though, clearly waiting on a response, so Thomas forces his voice to work around the sudden bar across his throat.

“Right,” he rasps. He’d forgotten that. Or he’d forgotten speaking the name out loud — the events of the... whatever it was, seizure or not, have come back to him in more detail than he would honestly prefer, and the moment when he looked at Alex but for the first time saw Hamilton stands out like a beacon. That he’d said the name out loud, though... “Who knows what I was thinking?”

“I just found it funny. Because of the way we look, you and I. And our names.”

His words are careful. Maybe like a man with some unnatural suspicion.

Or maybe — and Tom’s stomach flips abruptly on the axis of an icy knot of horror, _why didn’t this occur to him sooner_ — maybe like a man with an entirely natural suspicion. Maybe like a political rival sensing an opening, an exposed belly, an opportunity to get rid of a man who has stood in his path for a decade now.

 _Non compos mentis._ Hamilton may not be able to get him expelled from the Senate, but what other Senator is going to work with Tom if it comes out that he thinks he’s the reincarnation of Thomas Jefferson, slave owner and author of the Declaration of Independence? Besides, Tom’s constituents will certainly have something to say about it in the voting booth, come 2018.

Tom folds his arms across his chest to stop their shaking, and carefully extracts a laugh from somewhere so far down in him it might as well have come from the soles of his feet.

“I just went to the Jefferson Memorial the other day,” he says. “It is damn weird.”

“Yeah.” Alex’s eyes search the middle distance, fingers rolling and unrolling from his palm, and then abruptly he goes perfectly still, back straight. Chest out, hands in fists. Like a lightning rod. “Thomas? Why did you call me Hamilton?”

“I’m sorry?” He can’t bring himself to speak above a whisper, in case it cracks the stone of this moment wide open.

As quickly as he froze, Alex comes unstuck. His chin dips and his eyes flash to the side, then all at once he’s pacing around Thomas, like a circling shark. His chin has firmed with familiar, bullheaded resolution, and he says. “You called me ‘Hamilton.’ Just out of the blue.”

“I was having a seizure, Alex.”

“But you remember saying it.”

“I do. I do remember saying it, but, once again: I. Was. Having—”

“I understand that, but you can’t deny how strange it is. And I want to know if there was some sort of—” and Hamilton is suddenly in front of Thomas, leaning forward on his toes, his eyes shadowed and sharp, and Thomas shoves him away, hard. Alex staggers back, catching himself on the chairs in front of his desk. The flowers pitch forward, snagging in the gap between the armrests and the table.

“I don’t _know_ why. No matter how many times you ask me, Hamilton, that’s not going to change!” Tom snarls, and then sways as the blood leaves his face fast enough to make him dizzy. What the hell is wrong with him?

“There it is again,” Alex murmurs. “ _Hamilton_.”

Thomas takes a lurching step back, but Alex’s hand closes around his arm. Tom flinches, staring back at him with dread.

“Let go of me.”

Slowly, finger by finger, Alex lets him go. His eyes are as sharp as blades, and burn with something like triumph.

Then he says, “You do remember.”

And the world turns upside down.


End file.
